An employee of the Faculty of History and Philology of the Russian State University for the Humanities and a specialist in the history of English literature of the Middle Ages and Modern Times, Maria Eliferova is actively raising money for the first electronic scientific journal on medieval studies in Russia, which does not restrict itself to disciplinary boundaries.
- What do you do in medieval studies?
Maria Elifyorova, philologist, Ph. D., Institute of Philosophy, Russian State Humanitarian University: “My main specialty is the history of English literature, but I, let's say, could not stay away from other topics: as a student I was distracted by Shakespeare studies, then there was Shakespearean influences in the literature of the Pushkin era.
Anglistics in the USSR was staged very well, but very selectively: it consisted mainly of Shakespeare, Byron and Dickens. For those who are simpler, there was Agatha Christie. There were almost no other English authors in the Soviet mind. Jeffrey Chaucer's reading was already elitist, he was lucky in this sense - he was "promoted" by the translator Ivan Alexandrovich Kashkin.
I recently wrote a review of Andrei Azov's book "Defeated Literalists", which examines exactly the struggle of Soviet translators for publishing orders: the selection of whom to translate and publish was in fact determined not only by the politics handed down from above, but also by the covert struggle of translators for orders. who were quite rude to competitors, justifying their orders by progressiveness, and, accordingly, calling all the others reactionary. Everyone, of course, had their own ideas about this. So Kashkin won with Chaucer's transfer.
It should be added that he was translated for a clear reason: Chaucer's poetics is quite close to us - he has a "Pushkin" language, especially since he played the same role in the formation of the English language as Pushkin did in Russian. We compare Pushkin with Shakespeare more, which is typologically incorrect, because the point is not in the greatness of the people being compared.
Shakespeare found the already established and mature tradition of English literature, and Pushkin lived in the era of the emerging tradition of Russian literature and gave it direction. Chaucer was a similar figure in the history of English literature: he created a strict but light, classic, slightly playful language, quite similar to Pushkin's. Therefore, there were no problems with Chaucer in the USSR.
Promotional video:
And I am studying William Langland, who has a completely different poetics - his work reflects the trend of that time, the revival of English alliterative verse. In the second half of the XIV century, during the era of King Edward III, there was a rather massive fashion for the revival of the Old English tradition: the Norman conquest was ousted from history, and everything that came before it was declared an ideal.
And to this, an attempt was made to revive the alliterative verse. True, by that time English itself had changed beyond recognition: it had already acquired an almost modern grammatical system, so such a verse turned out to be rather clumsy: this is a tonic verse without rhyme, in which it is difficult to trace any rhythm, but in which there are supporting words with alliteration …
As a rule, these words are 3 or 4 per line. But the classic alliterative verse in Germanic poetry was also divided into hemistichs, and it had a rather rigid structure that required a certain number of syllables, etc. And in Middle English poetry, this structure is loosened - fortunately for a Russian translator.
There are some crazy innovations that did not exist before. For example, even prepositions and prefixes were alliterated. With this very verse, William Langland wrote a huge poem "The Vision of Peter Pahar".
On the other hand, this does not at all correspond to the ideas of a Russian person about poetry, because for us poetry is smooth and melodic poetry. I had to look for some stylistic reserves, since Langland also has a very colorful language: it is a mixture of the language of the Bible, sermons - right down to wild vernaculars. I had to look for words in Russian dialects and almost turn to the vocabulary of the 17th century to find lexical reserves there.
The Canterbury Tales
- Why are you interested in this particular story?
- This is a rather significant text in the history of English literature - the British themselves consider it as such. He firmly entered the canon, although it is not considered a masterpiece. It is included in English anthologies, translated into modern English. And here it was practically not translated: there is one interlinear translation of the 1940s, and at the same time it is quite illiterate. Unfortunately, it was done by a historian, not a philologist - D. M. Petrushevsky. There are a lot of funny mistakes, for example, James the Gentle is translated as Jacob the Gentile, although the meaning is about the apostle James.
And there is another translation of this text for the anthology edited by Purishev, not complete, but poetic, although the text was translated by white iambic pentameter, which simply did not exist in this era - it appeared in English literature only in the 1530s.
I tried to translate in the original size, or at least as close to the size as possible in Russian. At the moment, only two chapters have been fully translated, and already quite a long time ago, in 2006. They were published in the anthology "Centaur". I continue to translate different parts, distracting myself, unfortunately, with other pressing matters.
Of the Middle English alliterative revival, the Russian reader is more familiar with the poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" - the author is unknown. This is one of the first recordings of the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in English. This text is more fortunate because of the thematic closeness to the famous plot.
There is a myth that berserkers wore animal skins and put themselves into a trance state, thus frightening the enemy. But in fact, this is partly legendary information, and partly constructed by later historians.
I planned to study the Middle Ages from the very beginning, but now I have one more love - the Old Norse theme, which I am actively engaged in. Now my research is based on the plot about berserkers - these are such mysterious characters, about which quite a lot has been written on the Internet and Wikipedia, but not everything is true.
I am now unraveling this tangle: it turns out that a significant part of this information is simply missing from the sources. For example, the legend that berserkers used fly agaric. This is not the case in any saga. This was invented by an 18th century antiquarian who found out that in Siberia shamans used fly agarics, and made a similar assumption about berserkers, although this is not supported by anything.
- On the Internet you cannot get reliable information only on this topic, or is the problem a little deeper?
- Unfortunately, deeper. This is the problem of "open" knowledge of the Middle Ages, or rather, inaccurate information on this topic on the Internet. Even at one time I had a project for an encyclopedia of historical myths: it turned out a kind of dictionary of deeply rooted and untrue ideas. For example, a fairly widespread myth about the torture weapon "iron maiden" is a hollow structure made of iron, in which a person was supposedly placed, and inside there were thorns.
However, this instrument did not exist in the Middle Ages - it is not even mentioned anywhere until the end of the 18th century. I recently watched the 1920s film adaptation of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, and this maiden is there. Although even Hugo, who was extremely careless about historical facts, did not have this.
There is a museum object that is exhibited as a medieval instrument of torture called "The Iron Maiden", but it was made in the 19th century and is considered a "copy of a lost object." Whether such an object actually existed remains a mystery. The history of the Middle Ages is full of such "pop", which is actively spreading on the Internet or popular literature.
Iron Maiden by Tim Jones
- Where did all these errors come from?
- Firstly, many myths are based on old hypotheses of historians of the 18th-19th centuries. They were originally expressed as hypotheses, but were taken up as facts without verification. The historian can make a hypothesis, assuming a particular course of events, but this requires verification. Errors begin when a hypothesis is considered a fact without verification. Such things quickly pass into fiction because of their showiness. For example, in Wikipedia, in an article on scalping among the Indians, it is written that the same was practiced among the ancient Germans.
This error had the following origin: no source mentions this fact, but in the 5th century Lex Visigothorum existing in the Latin source of Visigothic law, the term "decalvatio" is used as a punishment for some offenses, in the sense of cutting hair. It was a shameful punishment. However, one historian suggested an exotic interpretation of the term as "scalping", which was quickly picked up without verification, although cutting off hair is a fairly well-known and studied practice of punishment among the ancient Germans.
From the sagas, you can understand that even getting your hair dirty was considered shameful. For example, there is one episode in the 13th century saga "In the Circle of the Earth" (Heimskringla), when a character, before being executed by beheading, asks the executioner not to stain his hair. But scalping is much more impressive. Exotic versions of the Middle Ages are more perceived in popular culture.
“On the other hand, in the Middle Ages itself, people actively created myths about the reality around them.
- Quite right. For example, the myth of Pope John was launched in the Middle Ages itself, although it was late - only in the 13th century there was “evidence” that such a woman lived either in the 8th or 9th century. It is another matter that historians must distinguish myths from facts and myths created in the Middle Ages itself from myths created later. And largely thanks to the historical novels of the same Hugo or Walter Scott, the ordinary public - not specialists - is more difficult to do.
- How do historians do it? Are there any techniques? For example, in the 19th century, researchers did not have the scientific tools and methods of obtaining knowledge that modern ones have. They could only speculate. Are they now referring to the historical knowledge of previous eras, if, for example, the original is lost?
- It is always best to check knowledge by sources. And the most important auxiliary discipline is called philology (I ask philologists to forgive me for this). Philology appeared long before the 19th century - at least in the 15th century, and since then has produced very positive results. I'm talking about Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), who serves as the emblem of my project on Planeta.ru and who used philology to expose the forgery: to analyze the letter of Emperor Constantine, or the Constantine gift given to the popes for power over certain regions in Italy …
Lorenzo Valla simply analyzed the language of this letter. It turned out that this is not classical antique Latin. Although Constantine lived in the period of late antiquity, Latin was his native language, and the presented document was written in the 8th century in some kind of barbaric broken Latin, which, of course, differed from the language of the Roman Empire. Lorenzo himself did not like his own conclusion, but he nevertheless announced that this document was fake. A huge scandal broke out throughout the Catholic Church, which they tried to quickly hush up, but it was already difficult to believe in the authenticity of Konstantin's gift. A hundred years later, this discovery was already published in Germany in large editions, where Lutheranism was gaining strength, and people were interested in the struggle against the pope.
Even before the invention of all sorts of natural-scientific methods of verification, like the chemical dating of the ink with which the manuscript was written, there were quite reliable means of attributing the text by language.
- Is it easy for a researcher from Russia to access these archives? Are there many documents left?
- In fact, there are a lot of things left, and the main problem is that we, as Pushkin said, are lazy and incurious: to study the Middle Ages you need to know languages. At the very least, you need to know Latin well, you need to know old English and German, you need the skill of reading the Gothic font, and so on. Few people are able to make such an effort, because everyone is interested in faster and easier. This is where the myth-making comes from.
Many of the medieval texts were published long ago: in the 19th century, the Germans did a wonderful publishing job, the British also noted in this direction. And since copyright has lost its force over time, almost all of them are in the public domain on the Archive.org website, which, by the way, for some unknown reason, was recently blocked by Roskomnadzor. Allegedly, there was some link to some extremist website, and therefore the entire resource was blocked.
Medieval texts published in the 19th and early 20th centuries are available on the site, and these editions are often still unsurpassed in quality. There are complaints, of course, but no one has done better yet: German publishers already then published texts on different lists, that is, they cited all versions of this or that material. There were, of course, more popular editions in which the texts were simply compiled.
- And what is the alternative to all this?
- With my project, I propose to create a completely electronic, regularly published publication that will focus on European history and culture. The journal is supposed to be made mainly in Russian, but, of course, in part also in English. There are enough authors in Russia who initially write well in English.
The magazine will cover not only the Middle Ages, but also the New Age up to the 19th century. Restrictions are planned to be introduced only on a geographical basis: it would be too ambitious to include oriental studies there. I do not feel confident in this matter and am not sure that it is possible to successfully combine research on the East and the West in one edition.
At this stage, materials are selected manually. I contact those authors whose research seemed interesting to me, and ask them to send me an article or write it specifically for the journal. Now the material on the Russian historiography of the 18th century in English is being prepared for publication, more precisely, the article itself concerns the Russian historiography of the Middle Ages and some problems of Russian history that were touched upon in the 18th century. The study is interesting both from the point of view of Russian history and from the point of view of the reception of Russian history in Russian historiography. This area is little known in the West.
The journal should be open to all suggestions and responses to its work, including students, postgraduates, undergraduates and even independent researchers who are not affiliated with any academic institutions, since there are extremely interesting works among independent researchers. This resource for science should not be lost.
Of course, articles will be subject to pre-moderation. In addition, we have a peer review institute that excludes the publication of dubious discoveries. The reviewers themselves look at articles only on their subject, that is, the issue of quality is very important for the project and for science. I now lack a specialist in the Italian Renaissance, since I have already found reviewers in Scandinavian, English and French Middle Ages, there is a Hispanist, and so on.
In addition, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed. The journal must be registered as a media and maintain it on a specific domain. The registration procedure itself requires money - and this is one of the reasons why I turned to crowdfunding. The next stage is the registration of the journal in the RSCI (Russian Science Citation Index). This requires more moral effort, since I have not yet been able to get any intelligible information from them about the procedure. It would, of course, be nice to get into the international systems Web of Science or Scopus, but humanitarian journals have practically no chance - in these systems, 3 or 4 Russian journals are indexed, which, in general, are far from the best. It is all the more obvious that foreigners do not read them.
My goal is to reach out to a foreign audience, so it is assumed not only to write articles in English, but also translations from Russian by some authors who are considered classics in our country, but are unknown in the West. This educational work is essential. For example, the articles of Alexander Nikolaevich Veselovsky (1838-1906), the existence of such an author is known in the West, but his works have not yet been translated, therefore many Western social anthropologists, folklorists, mythologists and medievalists invent the wheel, thinking what They discovered things, although Veselovsky wrote about it at the end of the 19th century. I think that his works are relevant and interesting even by the standards of the development of modern science - he just needs to be translated.
- And what about the training of medievalists in Russia? Do they know, for example, Latin at a level?
- The fact is that Latin is studied at all philological faculties, just someone is taught better, and someone worse. Still, the situation with the preparation of medievalists in Russia is not very good. Almost the only way to become a medievalist is to attend a seminar by a well-known specialist in the Middle Ages. In this area, much is still built on the charisma of the scientist. We lack an institutional approach to studying the Middle Ages.
- Is it worth it then to highlight the specialization of historians? And at what level of education?
- We can talk for a long time about the levels of education. The curriculum policy at the undergraduate level raises many questions. In world practice, bachelors in history and philology are not distinguished - there is a so-called bachelor in Liberal arts (bachelor of arts), that is, one general education specialty, and further specialization is already underway at the master's level. In Russia, the plans of specialists for the old nomenclature were stuck and they were cut down to the requirements for training bachelors. However, it turned out that the modern bachelor-historian is no longer a specialist, but also not a graduate of a wide profile. Judging by the level of modern requirements, we can say that not only medieval studies are not needed, even history can be dispensed with. Only basic knowledge is required.
At the master's level, of course, the situation is different. The Middle Ages is a rather long period, and everyone understands that the ancient historian is not doing at all what a specialist in modern times. Antiquity, at least, also needs to know the ancient Greek language. And medieval studies, by the way, according to the expansive principle, often includes the 16th and 17th centuries because a clear line is impractical: the methods tested on the material of the 15th century continue to work for the next two centuries. They even sometimes apply to the 19th century. For example, historians of the Victorian era in England use the same methods, since the historical and philological approach is integrated if we take topics related not so much to texts as to the era - for example, not the poetics of Jane Austen's novels, but educational policy in England during the era of Jane Austen …
- Do they even know our medievalists abroad? To what extent are Russian researchers included in world practice?
- There are, of course, a number of international specialists: our classic of Scandinavian studies, Elena Aleksandrovna Melnikova, from the younger specialists, this is Fyodor Borisovich Uspensky, with whom I have the honor to be acquainted. They are quite actively published abroad in English. But, of course, there are not very many of them. Getting into foreign magazines depends on many factors. Firstly, on the status of the author himself, and secondly, on the opportunity to travel to international conferences, since travel and personal acquaintances both here and in the West are the easiest way to expand the circle of contacts. If someone does not have the means to travel, then the chances of international publication will be lower.
- How would you formulate the main problems or trends occurring now in the field of studying the Middle Ages?
- In Russia, of course, there are more problems, since this area of research, let's say, is pushed into the shadows. It does not enjoy support, including material support, few scientific events take place on it, there are almost no special journals, but only collections. The second problem is the "party", because even these collections are published by a certain circle, which can be difficult to get into.
And if we talk about global problems, then I do not see them in the field of medieval studies, I see them in the field of the humanities in general. This is a problem primarily in the disunity of various research fields of knowledge: very often people do not know what is being done not only in a related discipline, but even in a related subject.
I was just now reviewing an English collection about Shakespeare, and this tendency was also noticeable there: the author writes an article without knowing some basic things from a related field, into which he invades.
The publishing policies of the magazines are also alarming. Since magazines offer open access to content if they are published with sponsorship money or with the money of the authors themselves. The second option, of course, is a direct path to various abuses. It is difficult to refuse to publish even a crazy article, if paid for it.
In the case of closed access, readers are charged huge money for downloading, since publishers live in the realities of the 19th century. They think that if printing books on paper is expensive, then electronic versions should cost the same. However, greed fails them. Naturally, the reader doesn't want to pay for the content. This also corrupts the reader, since he, in turn, is convinced that any information on the Internet is free. Content shouldn't be free - it should be available.